


Gnawing at himself to pass the time

by Bluandorange



Series: Happiness in Death [1]
Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Asterius' life and death freakin sucks, Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Charon mentioned in passing, Dehumanization, Gen, Heavy Angst, Life in Erebus, Murder, Pre-Canon, Pre-Elysium, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29010315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluandorange/pseuds/Bluandorange
Summary: The souls around him taught him the name of this place; he learned by keeping far from them but listening close. This shore is Erebus, where the souls of beasts and unwanted humans are left to wait for mercy from the boatman, who will not ferry them to judgement without coin. Humans are sometimes picked up from the shore--after a hundred years wait, however long that is--but the beasts never leave. No one comes for them.He doesn't know which one he's considered, here. He had human parents (he thinks) and possesses certain human traits, but not enough to live as humans do. He lived most of his life as a beast, died having never returned to the light, so maybe he will never ride the boat to the other side of the river they call the Styx.--The Minotaur's thoughts, regarding his murder and subsequent imprisonment on the shore of Erebus, as well as how he passes the time.A prisoner's thoughts, regarding the Minotaur.
Relationships: Asterius | The Minotaur & Theseus (Hades Video Game)
Series: Happiness in Death [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2165487
Comments: 7
Kudos: 87





	Gnawing at himself to pass the time

**Author's Note:**

> Hi! Strap in for some angst! If you don't want to read about how miserable Asterius' existence was before being brought to Elysium, this fic is probably not for you! For those of you on the fence, I will say that Theseus has a little epilogue that's much more hopeful. And definitely intended to be shippy. 
> 
> I've no idea if I'll write more fic, but if I Do, it'll be a continuation of this. It'd be a hell of an undertaking, but I'm really fascinated by what Asterius' journey might look like, maturing from feral shame-filled reject to sturdy and sure Champion of Elysium. Also I ship burgerking with a burning passion and would enjoy getting Mushy and/or Steamy about it. Anyway, enough blabber, on to the angst.

He was not taught many things. The lessons happened long ago and he has no way of knowing what is true and what is his own creation.  
  
He believes he lived like a human once. He remembers his mother, vaguely. Above the hallways, up in the light.  
  
He believes this, because he remembers a song. A melody, really. One of the words in the song was his name. He can't remember which word, he's forgotten all but the tune. He knows the tune, and he remembers being held. He remembers a woman's voice. When she sang the song to him, he was small, held in her lap, in her arms. He remembers loving her very much.

He thinks she tried to love him and could not. 

He thinks he had more family, but they were all human and therefore nothing like him, and they may have tried to love him, but could not. He thinks he did something wrong, something wicked, and that is why he was punished and locked away in the dark.

He believes this, because he remembers...wanting something? Or being denied something. Being grabbed or pulled. He remembers wanting to forget, to never think about the wicked thing that he did. Most of it is gone now, but he's killed so many humans, he can't forget what it feels like to ram his head hard enough to puncture skin. He can't forget how heavy it felt, holding a body up by one horn. The blood in his fur, dripping down his muzzle, getting in his eyes. He remembers the screaming. 

What he doesn't understand is, if it was wicked of him to kill, why did they starve him? Why did they keep setting people loose in his hallways? Was he expected to do something else? Something besides hunting them for food? That was the only use _he_ had for them. They never came to him with _instructions_ .  
  
He was not taught when to expect the humans. He did not know what metric they used to decide the time had come. He had to learn the hard way that the gap between groups was long, and their numbers were always small.  
  
Fourteen. Only fourteen.  
  
He remembers being very _stupid_ and _wasteful_ with the first group. He ate them too quickly and starved for so very long after. It was then, in his starvation, that he began gnawing at himself. It is a habit he can't seem to break, even now. He has stopped trying to _literally_ eat himself, but the pressure-pain of his teeth against his own flesh still distracts, for a little while, from the pain of his hunger. It is a bad habit. He learned he could make himself very sick if he broke the skin and the wound got angry and full of pus, but still he could not break the habit.  
  
It doesn't matter now. Now he's dead; he has no real skin left to break.  
  
Still, he finds himself tucking his arm between his teeth when he's nothing better to do. It both feels the same and like nothing at all. This place is confusing like that.  
  
The souls around him taught him the name of this place; he learned by keeping far from them but listening close. This shore is Erebus, where the souls of beasts and unwanted humans are left to wait for mercy from the boatman, who will not ferry them to judgement without coin. Humans are sometimes picked up from the shore--after a hundred years wait, however long that is--but the beasts never leave. No one comes for them.  
  
He doesn't know which one he's considered, here. He had human parents (he thinks) and possesses certain human traits, but not enough to live as humans do. He lived most of his life as a beast, died having never returned to the light, so maybe he will never ride the boat to the other side of the river they call the Styx.  
  
The human souls taught him that without judgement, those left in Erebus remain on the edge of life and death. He is not the only one stuck starving, exhausted, frightened. There are many souls who wander and weep and moan about their famines and illnesses. Some were prisoners, like him. Some died violent deaths. All, he's come to think, died alone and unloved.  
  
It clings to them all, the isolation. Human souls mill about, at times oblivious to the others around them, lost in their own anguish. They have the opportunity for companionship, stand and lay not a hands width from each other, but it doesn't matter. They knew no companionship in life, and now fumble and fail to gain it in death.  
  
He's no better. The dark of Erebus is not so unlike the dark of the hallways. The hunger draws him back and without meaning to, he finds himself wondering where his prey ran off to, where he buried his last kill. Without meaning to, he tucks his arm in and bites down.  
  
Time was hard to gauge before. Now it is impossible. He's no way of knowing how long he lingers in the past, how long he spends staring out into the slowly flowing waters in his new present. It doesn't matter--he is likely here forever--but it's still another small torture. He can't even use sleep as an escape, here. There is only the shore and his last waking day in the hallways to shift between. There is no escape from the hunger, in past nor present. There will never be a future.  
  
There were times, in the hallways, when he wished to die. It seemed like an elegant solution, really. He could escape the rot and filth and loneliness of his prison through sleep, so wouldn't it just be best to lie down and never wake again? He had no way of knowing eternal sleep would bring him here. He wasn't taught such things. He was not taught about paying the boatman, or the shore of the forgotten. Why would he have thought there'd be such a place? How could there be someplace worse than his home?  
  
Not that he has escaped the halls. He hasn't. He relives his death often, and when he isn't reliving it, he's deeply, _passionately_ resenting it. When he cannot feel the arms locking around his throat, he sits and hates the man he could not shake, who slowly drained him of breath and life. Had he not been bested by that human he might have lived to die some better way. A full stomach, for example; that would be a marked improvement. Who knows what the future he might have had, why, one day he might have escaped the hallways altogether. He might have survived long enough to plead his case to his family and win back whatever love a beast such as he could acquire. As impossible as it may have been, he still had the _chance_ of it, when alive. There was still the possibility of relief. There was hope, even when he was too bloodthirsty to feel it properly, there was _hope_ he could have earned more than the halls.  
  
It's almost worse that here he is somewhat sane. Not sated, no, but full _enough_ to think and feel beyond the bounds of his hunger. His mind can be as hungry as his stomach, and it is cruel how this place teases him with its opportunities for knowledge. It's cruel that now he's able to sit and listen and quietly learn more words, the names for places and things, the events and holy days and histories of the world of the light. He can practice them to himself all he likes (and he does), but he'll never use them. There is no opportunity for companionship in Erebus. There's no point in approaching the souls lost in the past, and the aware ones, well. Not even his soul can be mistaken for human.  
  
Yet he knows he's no animal. How? Because the animals in Erebus are at peace. This shore is, he is certain, their intended resting place. They group with others of their kind, mimic play or grooming, walk dreamily and obliviously past what they may have hunted, or what may have hunted them in life. Death doesn't cling to them the way it does to humans abandoned on the shore. He envies them. He wonders if the hunger were stronger, the exhaustion heavier, if he were brought below his ability to reason before death, if then he would be like any other bull, here, going through the motions. Slowly chewing grass. 

But would he be a beast, or simply a man insane? There are many madmen on the shore. He understands them better than he'd like to, what with the way they claw at nothing and then at themselves. The rocking and crying. The sounds they make that only they know the meanings of. They, like him, have moments of clarity. When they remember where they are, and that they're dead, and that death has not released them from themselves. Some of them sit, like he does, at the shore and stare at the waters, waiting for when the madness will take them again. Some cry and wail and rage, like he does, and their words and reasoning make perfect sense to him.  
  
He understands them, but he does wonder if his madness was different. They aren't part beast, like he is. It's possible it can't be the same; he doesn't know. Maybe it isn't fair to call what overcame him 'madness', maybe 'losing humanity' is more precise. It would feel that way, when the hunger grew, and grew, and took up so much space that he couldn't think, like his thoughts were being crowded out, and there was nothing left but instinct to drive him. His mind changed, then. It took on a different shape. He became stupid and violent, and always afraid, and everything was 'now'. No past, no future, just now, _now_ . Hungry _now_ , thirsty _now_ , frightened _now_ . Needing needing _needing_ , until he killed, until he ate something. Someone. His humanity bought with theirs. 

He spent his last waking hours human--well, 'human-minded'--so it's likely he will never experience that madness again. It's just a memory now. There's some relief in knowing that. It's easy to get lost in memory, true, but only because there's nothing to do, here. Just sit and think and feel whatever those thoughts make him feel. Quiet contemplation can be its own torture--he is so very sick of the company of his own thoughts--but it's simply not the same as slipping back in time and reliving his last gasp of life. That slip is an involuntary thing; there is no warning, no possible preparation, no bracing for impact. He slips, and he forgets he was ever on the shore. He forgets all he's learned since dying, because in that moment he is alive again, and he's killed one of the fourteen, eaten half its body and buried the rest.  
  


And he's running. Chasing another human down, a stupid human who didn't run when it found where he'd been sleeping. Who watched him wake and _then_ threw itself at him, intending to fight him. Who tried taking him by the horns and wrestling him to the floor, which of course it couldn't do. He was rested and fed and it was a human, brought here to be hunted. Brought here to be his meat.  
  
He hunts it now, until he loses it where the hallways cross over themselves. He doesn't care. He'll find it another time. The first kill is still fresh; it'd be a waste to kill another so soon.  
  
He thinks of going down to the lake to drink. He starts that way, starts leveraging himself between the floors, in this junction where the hallways cross. Lowers himself to a hallway below. He lands on his feet--  
  
\--and then something lands on him. 

Echoing, throaty voice. Desperate, prideful. Has him by the ears, seated on his shoulders, legs around his neck. Yanks at him, painfully, and hasn't _shut up_ .  
  
He twists and lets himself fall against the stone railing. The gloating tips into higher panicked notes, abruptly cutting off as the air's smashed out of the human's lungs by his weight. The hands loosen, the human stunned; he shoves his thumbs up along its palms, freeing his ears. The human gasps as he rights himself. Its now loose fingers start grasping at his mane. One pulls a chunk of fur loose, the other gets a steady fist full just as he's wrenching the legs apart and shoving them up and back. It sends the human tumbling, its own body knocking its hand free. It takes more of his mane with it. 

He hears it falling over the railing. Hears its nails scrambling for purchase on stone. The scream. The scream cut off as its breath is knocked free a second time, the heavy dull thud of its body hitting the floor below.  
  
It isn't dead. It's groaning within moments. He can see and hear its heels sliding in the dust as it squirms in pain. Like a bug would.  
  
He leaves it there. It'd be a waste to kill another so soon. He takes a different path to the lake.  
  
He calls it a lake; it is a flooded chamber connected to the hallways. It was much smaller once, but the drip from the crack in the wall is steady and the floor of the chamber solid, so it's grown and grown, and now he has a lake to drink from.  
  
There are other drips; the river, the pond, several muddy puddles. There's even the salt lake down in the lowest halls; his own small slice of the sea. Sometimes fish appear there. They can be hard to spot, as the water is dark, and harder to catch, as the water is deceptively deep.  
  


Not unlike the water, here. The water here...he doesn't like it. At least the water of the salt lake wasn't red.  
  
(Ah, see? It's happened again.) 

Again, he chides himself. Should have killed that human while it was lying there, belly up, vulnerable. Should have crushed its skull beneath his foot. Should have torn its stupid arms off. Never given it the _chance_ to latch around his throat.  
  
He should have known it was there to hunt him. It hadn't acted right; he should have known.  
  
All the other humans were afraid of him. Would fight, once cornered, but fled at the first opening. Assuming they hadn't lost hope. The hopeless didn't fight. Just cried, usually.  
  
The human that killed him was not hopeless, though he caught fear in its eyes more than once. He's sure it saw fear in his. But it did not _come_ at him afraid. It came at him determined, a brazen, unshakable predator. It tracked him, hiding, retreating only when it couldn't tip matters in its favor. It grew smarter and bolder as the chase wore on. He'd tried to hunt it in turn, tried to meet its boldness and match its wits. He couldn't leave it running wild; the bastard was relentless. He couldn't sleep, or eat, or lick his wounds. It would find him.  
  
It did find him, exhausted from the hunt, stupid from lack of sleep. It allowed him to chase it into the tighter hallways. He'd been hoping to corner it. He was cornered instead, and rode, and could not dislodge the human no matter how many walls he threw himself toward. It did not falter; it held him for what felt like eternity, as he stumbled blindly and pulled and thrashed. The vice only closed tighter and tighter, allowing him less and less air. It drained his strength.  
  
It told him to die, in a quiet, rasping, pleading voice. Over and over, told him to die, until he did.  
  
He hates it. He hates it and hates himself for losing to it. He hates that it likely knew where it was sending him, because it was a person from outside, so someone would have taught it such things. He hates that this knowing didn't stay its hand. He hates not knowing if it decided to kill him for itself, or if it was sent in with that purpose, to put an end to him, since he hadn't the decency to starve in darkness of his own accord. 

If he wasn't wanted, why did they let him live at all? Why place him in the hallways? Why send him humans? Why expect anything but wickedness from him, when he was a monster and couldn't control himself and _had_ to eat?  
  
Why send a young man, naked and without weapon, to murder him?  
  
...was it even a murder? Is he allowed to consider himself a murdered man? No. No, not likely. Slaughtered, then. Like any other meat.  
  
What he wouldn't give to be simple meat. Like the other bulls. They don't care. They aren't left with questions and doubts and indignant rage. They don't wonder to themselves what the point of their misery was, if there was a point to it at all.  
  
He hates them, too. The animals and the humans. He hates that he is neither and is allowed no place among them. He hates that he is both. Insatiable beast; miserable and lonely man.  
  
He hates himself. 

He hates so much it hurts, and he goes a little mad from the pain. There is nothing to destroy but the shore itself, so he tears at the ground and bellows out at the dark, throwing chunks of earth into the red water. He screams until he cries, and the exhaustion brings him to his knees. He doesn't care if there are souls aware enough to hear the pathetic, wounded noises he makes. They'll forget him soon enough. He'll forget himself, too, eventually. Until then, the pain has to go somewhere. Sometimes he gnaws at himself as a distraction. Puts his arm between his teeth and bites down. It feels like it used to and like nothing at all. It passes the time.  
  
Sometimes he sings his mother's song to himself. He tries to remember the words, because he thinks one of the words was his name. What he would do with it, now, he isn't sure. He tries, anyway. It, too, passes the time.  
  


* * *

  
  


The Minotaur is crying again, tonight.  
  
(Today?)  
  
Long, low bellows of sorrow that carry across the Styx.   
  
They always sound so lonely. He longs to tell them that he is here! He is listening! Always! And he hasn't forgotten! He could never forget them.  
  
He wants to thank them for keeping him company, out here in the dark. For finding him, somehow. They may not know they two are together again, now fellow prisoners, but they are. Together, they are not alone. 

To his sorrow, seemingly as soon as they began, the bull begins to quiet. In no time at all, their anguish is lost to him, absorbed and deafened by the voices, and cries, and sobs of countless other shades wandering the shore of Erebus.  
  
He can feel nothing in his prison of stone, affixed to a pillar on the edge of Tartarus. He is utterly, _entirely_ numb, but he imagines his heart twisting, his stomach dropping as his dearest friend pulls away. Don't leave him! It's so dark here! If left all alone, he'll have nothing but his own thoughts to occupy him, and Gods know he makes for _terrible_ company. 

If he cannot stand to suffer his own presence, then how wretched of him, truly, to dream of imposing himself upon the Bull of Minos again. 

...And yet.  
  
And yet surely it is right of him, right of him and _just_ that he long to repay the comfort their presence has brought him, here and now. In consideration of the Bull's current circumstances, surely any companionship would be an improvement, even that of himself.  
  
He's soon reminding himself that the Minotaur may not only grow to despise him in time, but could very well feel nothing but contempt for him this very moment. Do they not rage from their side of the Styx? Has he not heard them roar with passionate malice, a perfect echo of the sound that rattled his bones and shook his convictions as a young man? The very sound that's haunted his dreams ever since he escaped its labyrinth? He's grown to find comfort in this sound, for he's now bereft of all other comforts, cut off from all things familiar. He must be mad thinking another would, unprompted, find it in themselves to extend such charity toward him. To feel affection for him, when he is their mortal foe. Worst! Worse than foe, he was their murderer!

He goes in circles, he knows. Talking himself into it, talking himself out of it again. He imagines the dismissal, the rage, the hatred in their eyes. He imagines impossible things, too. A friendship, a brotherhood forged in combat, a reprisal of their battle to the death within the hallowed halls of Elysium itself! He imagines many things, because he is left with far too much time and is compelled to fill it with _something._

...but.

But, eventually, they begin singing again. 

Who knew the Minotaur knew how to sing?! And with such mournful beauty?! He was told they were little more than a beast, but no. No, he cannot hear that solemn melody and believe it born of nothing but a beast's heart. That soul across the waters is man's. A man he recognizes. A man he is grateful to hear from again, after so many years apart. 

The singing always settles his convictions. He _will_ reunite with the Bull one day. He must. There are wrongs to be made right and questions begging to be answered. It may be a failed venture, his empathy may fall on deaf ears, and still he must try. He must tell them that their cries were not in vain. They did not go unheard. He must thank them for their company.  
  
He must, for he knows he would be lost in this darkness without them.


End file.
